


To Rust

by lixabiz



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Autumn, F/M, Fall Colours, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-01
Updated: 2015-10-01
Packaged: 2018-04-24 08:45:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,388
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4912891
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lixabiz/pseuds/lixabiz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A leaf falls off a nearby tree, for a moment it gets caught on a burst of wind and hovers in the air, like a dangling semi-colon - connecting this moment, seemingly independent, to all the moments that have come before it. Written for timepetalsprompt’s Friday Ficlets prompt: “Fall Colours”.</p>
            </blockquote>





	To Rust

The leaves go rusty, earning a fiery glow before they fall, and the days go short.

It’s an illusion, but that’s what being earth-side means. A day is twenty-four hours, no ifs and buts or two ways about it. The sun sets and that’s evening and there’s a bite to the air when it rises again, sudden and without warning. Things that didn’t hold meaning in the depths of space are now iron-clad rules, gripping onto him in the same way gravity keeps him bound to the leaf-cluttered pavement.

Autumn. The trajectory of a planet, rotating on its axis, in orbit around a burning sun. It’s somehow crisp and muddled at the same time, a melange of bursting colour. Oranges and golds and reds and _death_.

That’s what’s coming, of course.

The thought occurs to him now, as it did on a beach not so long ago. He remembers how the water lapped at his feet, wiping away all evidence of his journey.

No footprints in the sand, he thinks, the idea at once disturbing and wildly enticing, like venturing outside on a cold, cold day into a field of untouched snow. No tracks. No roots. A lone Venusian air-orchid, floating in the chill marshland, adrift from space and time.

—-

Rose asks, once, in the early days: _Should we get you checked over, by a medic or something?_

He says, _Nah, I’m fine_ , when what he really means is, _Better not, my DNA might give somebody the wrong idea._

The day he insists on coming with her to work, she looks up at him, pleased and worried and skeptical, and asks, _Are you sure?_

_You must need time to adjust._

_I understand._

He says- _Not to worry._

He smiles, bright, unfiltered- _I am an expert on humanity!_

(What he means is: _I thought I had you lot figured out but blimey looking out is different from looking in, innit?_ )

Her smile in response is a fraction of a second too slow, and it’s with blazing, agonizing speed that he understands exactly what it means.

—-

The Doctor doesn’t leave dirty dishes in the sink, and puts them in the dishwasher promptly after each use. Jackie seems to find this amazing, and watches him as completes the mundane task, oddly satisfying in it’s own, boring, domestic way.

_The old you wouldn’t have done that,_ she points out, pleased.

He freezes like a clockwork robot. Rose doesn’t say anything and he doesn’t know if that’s better or worse.

_There is no old me,_ he thinks bitterly.

He’s one person, not a collection of bits and pieces of others.

He isn’t a hand and a bit of stray DNA- though sometimes it feels that way.

And the impulse, oh, the impulse is _so_ strong sometimes. The desire wells up inside him, a growing, cancerous thing, threatening to destroy what he’s been so fortunately given.

That’s him, through and through-

Running, always running-

It’s all he knows-

_She’d leave everything behind for you, in a heartbeat. She has. Her friends, her family, the entire bloody universe._

Without a second thought, he knows. Rose would do all of that, to be with him. Sacrifice anything. Everything.

_Can you?_

He’s always loved her, he thinks furiously, that isn’t the point. It’s a matter of devotion, of committing himself truly and fully and completely to Rose and her happiness and desires and needs. Of putting her first - universe be damned. He hasn’t been able to do it before. He can now.

_Yes,_ says the Doctor-

(He waits, like a fool, for someone to point and say _prove it_.)

—-

The TARDIS coral lies smouldering at the bottom of a crater, a dead ember.

Somewhere halfway between dreams and waking he hears her tiptoeing around his hospital bed. The sound of fabric rustling - his coat being removed from the foot of the bed to the visitor’s chair projects the vision of a pink skirt swirling across his closed eyelids. The memory sits painfully in his chest, clogging his throat, leaves him momentarily drowning in despair-

_There’s no choice._

_It’s earth, every time. It’s you, every time._

That’s the sort of man he is now.

The sort of man who runs headfirst into a world-ending disaster with untied laces and the taste of blood and revenge and anger on his tongue; the sort of half-alien who sacrifices the very last tie he has  - they have - with who he used to be.

The sort of self-serving bastard who pretends he’s asleep to avoid having a conversation he’d rather not have.

Maybe he’s not so different, after all.

_I’m the same man_ , he repeats in his head, over and over.

He’s not really sure who he’s trying to convince anymore.

—-

Autumn starts to bleed into winter; the cycle of chlorophyll-abundance and chlorophyll-absence coming to a close.  

They’re taking a walk when it comes as a lightning bolt, turning his world upside down.

_There’s other ways,_ she says, not quite meeting his eyes. _Alien tech, transporters, hovercraft, whatchamawhizzes, we’ve loads of them locked up at Torchwood. S'all dangerous, but if there’s anyone Pete’s gonna let go through it, it’s you. You can- you can still, it’s not over-_

He stops her mid-sentence with hand on her cheek and his heart bursting with wonder and guilt and love.

A leaf falls off a nearby tree, for a moment it gets caught on a burst of wind and hovers in the air, like a dangling semi-colon - connecting this moment, seemingly independent, to all the moments that have come before it. He’s been living in fear of reaching a full-stop, dreading the inevitable conclusion of every gnawing insecurity.

_Rose_ , he says, squeezing her other hand.

The pressure around her fingers travels straight to her chest, he can almost see it like he’s got x-ray vision. Rose’s heart is a stone, heavy and brittle, and he knows the feeling.

A voice in his head insists, _does it need saying?_

But that belongs to someone else-

Some unlucky sod who never stood a chance-

The person he was, still is, and isn’t - he’ll struggle with it for the rest of his life, each and every day, but he realises now that it’s _his_ struggle, not hers.

Not Rose, with her eyes big and and her heart even bigger. She looks at him with a glimmer of something he’s never been able to name, never been able to erase from his skin. There isn’t anything else like it across the Universe - any universe.

_Doesn’t matter,_ he says, in answer to her question-

(The very same one she’s been asking over and over, orbit after orbit, body after body, the one he’s put off answering for so long he’s forgotten it existed)-

_Doesn’t it? Without the TARDIS, you-_

He kisses her-

(What he means is: _You are enough._ )

And the miracle is - he’s stunned at his luck, really, that he keeps getting these miracles, day after day - she understands what he is trying to say.

She kisses him back.

—-

Autumn next year is a dreary, wet one, full of horrid weather and not a single alien threat to alleviate his desperate boredom. The Doctor relents to donning a burnt orange jumper under his blue suit and it clashes terribly, but it matches the fuzzy cardigan that Rose has taken to wearing in the mornings. It matches the carotenoids surfacing on the spindly fingertips of deciduous trees, too.

Funny, isn’t it, how survival routines always manifest with such glorious visuals?

Glowing, gold, bursting with regeneration- _not him, though._

(The thought is melancholy, but without weight. The slow path is an adventure he’s never been able to have, until now, and he’s fulfilling his destiny.)

Still, he grumbles that he feels like rust setting into old, wrought iron-

Rose laughs at him when he says such things, cracks a joke about him finally feeling his age, and when he looks out the window over his steaming cup of tea, he sees the last leaf fall off the tree that sits in their backyard. It lands gracefully in a puddle of rainwater, brilliantly red against the dead brown grass-

_We should put a fence up,_ he says thoughtfully, adjusting his spectacles on the bridge of his nose. _A rust-proof one._

_Next summer,_ says Rose, humming as she sips from her own mug.

—-


End file.
